These past few days and weeks (and let’s be honest, years) have been frightening and discombobulating. It feels as though certain things that were established hundreds of years ago that determine how justice works, how we take care of each other, how we interact with one another, all of these things are being recklessly smashed. However flawed they have always been, I’ve had a sense that we were moving (one step forward, one step back) towards a world that’s more just, more equitable, more tolerant. Now it feels like we’re hurtling headfirst into the abyss of all of the ugliest most terrible moments of our history as humans. It’s hard to know how this will resolve itself, harder to think about how we can work to resolve it.

The way I see it history is like a tapestry, and we’re all madly weaving away at our little portion of it, and making some sort of pattern that makes sense sometimes and makes less sense others. Sometimes we start out in wrong directions, sometimes we make mistakes, sometimes we can fix them and cover it up or make a new pattern, sometimes not. So Hitler, for instance, is the result of an infinite number of choices that his ancestors made, for centuries and centuries, down to his mother and father. Every single tiny choice they made every day of their lives resulted in Adolph Hitler’s existence, and not one of them could have had any idea how that would turn out. They were weaving a pattern in their portion of the tapestry, and when we look at it from miles above the fabric, and many years on in history, we see the pattern and the tragedy of it, but at the time, even after Hitler’s rise to power and the millions of people that made stupid, scared, even evil choices to follow him or not question him, even after that, they might not have seen the pattern that was forming, so close in it, as they were, so busy making it as time flew by them. And so concerned with the millions of other choices in their day-to-day lives that distracted them from the bigger picture, as we see it so clearly now.

From the beginning of time people have been weaving their own small portion, aware of people working nearby, but incapable of seeing the larger picture they’re all making together until much later in life. They know from the first that they have a pattern to follow, but there’s no clear plan for it, no diagram, they make it up as they go along, trying one thing or another until it makes sense. They might be following a pattern that their parents taught them, or copying from the people working close by. Various shapes and colors will come into and go out of fashion — some will notice and follow, others will not.

Sweeping events would overtake humanity and the earth every few hundred years: wars, natural disasters, famine, plagues. These formed huge, horrible changes in the pattern that everybody was weaving, but they didn’t know it at the time. Most of this was beyond the control of ordinary people, struggling to make their part of the tapestry as beautiful as possible. It made it hard for them to weave, or stopped them from weaving at all. Caught up in the struggle of keeping ourselves and our family alive, so deeply close to it and inside of it, we’re caught unaware by these waves of change sweeping over the tapestry.

And as people make a decision to use a certain color, or continue in a certain direction, they’re thinking what’s best for them at that time, they’re making narrow decisions based on survival and their idea of success. But it’s not impossible to see the bigger pattern if you take a step back. It’s not impossible to see what other people have made over the years, and reflect on the decisions that got them there, and to make decisions of your own to try a different pattern, to avoid tangles and tears that aren’t inevitable, that are always caused by the action of our own hands and the choices we make. This is called studying history, reading these patterns. This is valuable. And we can use what we learn from this studying of history to work together to plan the new patterns we follow, the new colors we choose. We can work together and take great care and make something strong. We can value all the different colors and techniques that people bring to the work.

Right now it feels as though someone is clumsily and violently hacking at the tapestry with dull rusty shears. It’s hard to see it all now, or to feel very hopeful, but we’re not in it alone, we have to believe that the fabric, no matter how thread-bare or torn or tangled, can be mended. We have to believe it is still strong or work to make it so.